| Accounting information system (AIS) is a vital component in the enterprise information system, and providing useful decision-making information is its destiny and eternal theme. Different from financial accounting (FA), management accounting mainly serves for internal management in the enterprise, which provides valuable management information for decision makers to manage and make right decision in flexible ways. As the carrier of management accounting information (MAI), the presentation format of the Management Accounting Report (MAR) will affect the performance of decisions, operation and management in the enterprise, which makes it necessary and urgent to explore the presentation format of MAR that is more in line with the decision-making rules and management requirements. In numerous information reporting formats, tables and graphics are used widely in MAR, so they come to our attention that which is more able to improve the decision value of MAR.It has raised a great research fever of decision value of financial accounting information and innumerable studies emerge since the groundbreaking study of Ball&Brown (1968). By contrast, the research of MAI decision value is rare. I think there are two potential reasons as follows:on the one hand, MAI utilized within the enterprise has no need to be public, so the data is more difficult to obtain and it is impossible to study on large samples. On the other hand, MA and related technology lag behind the practice needs, which discounted the value of MAI and aroused a big discuss about the relevance of MA in80s of the last century. Johnson and Kaplan (1987) argued that external financial reports occupying the dominant position in the enterprise is one of the reasons for the disappearance of the relevance of MA. Therefore, MA and MAR need continuous attention from researchers.Based on the above background and existing literature, this paper adopts experimental method and discusses the performance differentials of different formats (graphic VS table) between different types of decision makers (high problem-solving skill VS low problem-solving skill). It tries to show that presentation format of MAR affects decision-making value, and decision-makers’ characters will also work in this process.In this article, we try to provide better guidance and advice for practice.Experiment in this paper is a mix design which is2(Presentation format: table and graphic)×2(Personal characteristic:high and low problem-solving skill). The variable of Presentation format is a between-group design, while Personal Characteristic is a within-group design. Furthermore, we use Accounting Knowledge as a covariate. The main task of the experiment is product-pricing. MAR consists of the market information from sales department and cost information based on volume-based costing and CVP analysis. Specifically, the major part of the MAR provides sales, profit and cost information about a case enterprise product (Toy block) of the past five quarters in detail. Then it requires subjects to predict the price of next quarter. In this paper, we recruit115MPAcc students in a famous university of southwest as experiment subjects.The structure of the essay is listed as follows:Chapter1:Introduction. It mainly introduce the research background, significance, necessity of my research and the reason I choose this topic from the perspective of MAR practice and theory. It also explains the research content and method of this paper briefly. Finally, it discusses the contribution of this article.Chapter2:Literature Review. This part mainly reviews the relevant literatures of MAR internally and "Graphic VS Table" abroad. We clearly display the status quo and development of the study in this field, and also look for possible research point.Chapter3:Theoretical analysis and Hypothesis. In this part we introduce relevant theories of presentation format, such as the theory of representational congruence, decision style, and so on. Then it comes up with the research hypothesis.Chapter4:Experimental Design. This part presents the panoramic view of the experimental design about the objects, task, variables, incentive mechanism and experimental steps comprehensively and systematically.Chapter5:Experimental result and analysis. Firstly, we undertake descriptive statistics of the whole samples, and then perform mean test, ANOVA to test our hypotheses. We also do some robustness tests which verify the hypotheses. In addition, in the part of manipulation checks we discuss the validity and reliability of experiment design.Chapter6:Conclusion, Suggestions and Prospects. We draw a systematic summary of the results and discuss the suggestions and enlightenment to research field of MAR and relevant practice. Finally, we give our opinions on the deficiencies of this paper and future research.We expect that MAR presentation format will affect the decision value. In the process of this influence, decision-makers’ personal characteristics will militate. There are two kinds of MAR format which are table and graph in the study. Problem-solving skill of the decision makers is measured by Administrative Ability Test (ATT). In addition, the experiment also makes the cost accounting knowledge of the subjects as a covariate to control the effect of Knowledge which is measured by Cost Accounting Knowledge Instrument. Through the statistical test of the results of the experiment, we draw the following conclusion:the presentation format of MAR will affect decision results. During this process, format and problem-solving ability will be a certain interaction impact on decision performance, especially on decision-making time. Specifically, we find that table helps solve problems quickly and accurately for subjects with higher problem-solving ability, and this subgroup obtains higher decision making profits and use less time, and eventually improves the decision-making efficiency; graphical format has a better support function to subjects with lower level of problem-solving ability, and helps them to shorten the decision-making time, so as to improve the decision-making efficiency.The contribution of this paper mainly includes several aspects as follows:From the point of research topic, domestic or overseas research on decision value of MAR is relatively scarce, and most studies in China focus on the report system of MAR which discuss how to establish a perfect system of internal report; that is to say, it just answers the proposition of "what should be?" But we pay close attention to the specific problem which is the decision value of MAR presentation format (graphics and tables) to answer the question of "what?".From the point of view of research methods, this paper adopts experimental economics research method, and applies it to behavior management accounting research to discuss the role of "human" factors in the management decision. Through analyzing relevant literature and economic reality data, we design a product pricing decision task to simulate the reality situation, and form problem-solving ability instrument by choosing relevant questions from ATT question bank based on definition of problem-solving skill. We recruit a programmer to design a software program that can implement the process of the experiment. After the final experiment we use the professional statistical software (STATA) to process and analyze the experiment data. All in all, this article has overcome the defects of traditional MAR research by using comparatively scientific research method.From the perspective of research, this essay realizes the combination of the interdisciplinary field of research. Based on the research methods of experimental economics (economics experiment), cognitive psychology (decision-makers’ characteristics) and information systems (information presentation format), we discuss the behavior accounting research in the MA field (MAR).From the point of the research content, this paper makes an innovative study on the problem that how decision-makers’problem-solving ability influence decision value of MAR format (graphics VS tables). Because most previous literatures about the characteristics of the decision maker focus on experience, domain knowledge, cognitive style and decision making style, and the scanty literature studying ability makes the variable as a covariate. According to the related theory of cognitive psychology, decision-makers with high problem-solving skills are expected to be more able to fetch effective information from the complicated table information to make decisions, while decision-makers with poor skills are not able to ease cognitive overload in table format. But the later are more likely to obtain useful information quickly and efficiently from the graphical format information for decision-making. |
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